Technology
Review has teamed with CHI Research ofHaddon Heights,
NJ,to produce the Patent Scorecard,an industry-by-industry
ranking of corporate patent portfolios.CHI com-bines the
number of patents a firm receives with other indicators
to flesh out this deeper picture of innovation. Here are
the specifies:TECHNOLOGICAL STRENGTH: This figure, the
basis of the rankings, provides an over-all assessment
of a firm's intellectual-property power. It is calculated
by multiplying the number of a company's U.S. patents
by its Current-Impact Index (see below).
NUMBER OF PATENTS: The total number of U.S. patents awarded,
excluding design and other special-case inventions.
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CURRENT-IMPACT
INDEX:This measure showcases the broader significance
of a company's patents by examining how often its U.S.
patents from the previous five years are cited as "prior
art" in the current year's batch. A value of 1.0
represents average citation frequency, so 1.4 would indicate
a company's patents were cited 40 percent more often than
the average, and so on.
SCIENCE LINKAGE: Patents sometimes cite scientific papers
as prior art.This value shows the average number of science
references listed in a company's U.S. patents.A high figure
indicates the company is closer to the cutting edge than
its competitors.
TECHNOLOGY CYCLETIME: An indicator of a firm's speed in
turning leading-edge technology into intellectual property,
defined as the median age (in years) of the U.S.patents
cited as prior art in the company's patents.
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